Sunday, April 26, 2015

being Palestinian makes me Smile

by Amer Zahr

Simsim Publishing 2014

A review

This
past summer the world witnessed the horrendous Israeli government ordered
bombing of the Gaza Strip.This bombing
destroyed entire neighborhoods and over two-thousand people died as a
result.So, we might ask why would Amer
Zahr, a Palestinian, write a book titled, being
Palestinian makes me Smile?This is
how Zahr answers that question.

“As
a Palestinian, it can be very easy to become consumed by depression and despair.But I have noticed that laughter and crying
are not as different as they might seem.We have all seen people laugh so hard that they begin to cry.But have you ever seen people cry so hard
that they begin to laugh?I have.See, not that different.”

Amer
Zahr’s parents were both born in the land that was once called Palestine.His father and grandfather both lived as
refugees in Jordan.His parents met
while they were university students in California.Amer Zahr was raised by a loving family in a
suburban community in Pennsylvania.His
first language is Arabic, and, his story is about why Palestinians just can’t
forget where they came from.

For
many employers, Zahr’s resume would be impressive, but also a bit strange.He has a master’s degree in Middle Eastern
Studies, and a law degree.He is also a
comedian.Reading Zahr’s book
demonstrates why this seemingly strange resume makes perfect sense.

My background

I
happen to be Jewish.My parents wanted
me to understand a bit of our heritage, so they sent me to Hebrew school.I learned a very little bit of the Hebrew
language, and the teachers routinely attempted to fill my head with images of
how the state of Israel was a wonderful homeland for Jewish people.Along these lines, I remember donating one
dollar to plant a tree in Israel.

While
I must say that I was influenced by the Zionist arguments, I never embraced the
idea of a homeland for Jews in Israel.I
grew up in the Weekquahic section of Newark, New Jersey.At one time this neighborhood was almost
exclusively Jewish.Then, there was the
national phenomenon known as “white flight.”Black people moved into urban areas and white people moved out.

Growing
up I saw how there was a stark difference between the neighborhoods in Newark
and the suburban neighborhoods.While
the inner city school I attended didn’t have a full sized gymnasium, suburban
schools had tennis courts as well as swimming pools.I began to see that this immense disparity
didn’t happen because of insensitivity or incompetence.No, the reason for this disparity had to do
with something profoundly wrong with the political economic system in this
country.

Upon
reaching the age of thirteen, I celebrated the occasion with the typical Jewish
ceremony called the Bar Mitzvah.The
name of the Rabbi that officiated this service in Newark, New Jersey was
Joachim Prinz.

Rabbi
Prinz had quite a history and I remember my parents being impressed by who he
was.Prinz was a Rabbi in Nazi
controlled Germany for several years.After coming to this country, he became the President of the American Jewish Congress.He supported Martin
Luther King’s struggle to do away with Jim Crow segregation in this country.In this capacity, Prinz marched with King at
the head of the 1963 civil rights march on Washington.

However,
the core belief of Rabbi Prinz throughout his life was support for a Jewish
homeland in Palestine.Although Prinz
could have settled in Israel, he, like most Jews, decided to live in the United
States.

I
wasn’t a very good student in high school, but liked to participate in
sports.I also liked to watch the
movies.I remember two films released in
the 1960s that attempted to glorify the state of Israel.One was the film Exodus staring Paul Newman.The other was Cast a Giant Shadow staring
Kirk Douglas, the so-called “Duke” John Wayne, and none other than Frank
Sinatra.

These
films portrayed the people who colonized Israel as heroes.In the few times these films portrayed Arabs,
they were seen as mindless villains who had nothing better to do than get in
the way of those heroes who attempted to create a wonderful Jewish homeland.

We
might also think about the fact that during those years we also had numerous
films of the Cowboys and Indians.I might have seen hundreds or even thousands
of portrayals of Indians being murdered as if they were mere targets used for
shooting practice.

The
first time I recall seeing an Arab portrayed as a human being was in the film Lawrence of Arabia.This film portrayed a flawed, but
basically heroic white man who came to the Middle East to rescue Arabic people
by way of British colonialism.

In
the course of this film I saw the Egyptian actor, Omar Sharif.Although the film glorified British
colonialism, Sharif’s Arabic character, was portrayed as a genuine human being.

After
graduating from high school, I got involved in the movement against the war in
Vietnam.The Vietnamese people sustained
a heroic resistance to the foreign occupation of their country.The U.S. government demanded that I, and
every young man of my age, participate in the effort of effectively making
Vietnam a U.S. colony.In those days,
some of us made the argument that the United States became a nation because of
a political revolution against colonialism.

During
those years of the early 1970s, I began to question many of the ideas teachers
attempted to instill in my head in high school.I became a communist.I also met
a Palestinian woman who began to shatter my ideas of what the state of Israel
is.

I
discovered that all the glorifications that I heard about the state of Israel
were boldfaced lies.The British colony
of Palestine had a population that was over 90% Palestinian.Palestinians lost their homeland due to
British decrees, UN resolutions, Israeli racist terrorism, as well as laws
designed to steal land from its original inhabitants.

being Palestinian

Amer
Zahr gives us a somewhat thorough analysis of how Israeli government officials,
as well as the media in this country, routinely distorts the reality of
Palestine.Even before the creation of
the state of Israel, people who called themselves Zionists argued that the
indigenous people who lived in that region would have to be displaced.

Golda
Meir actually argued that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people.Israeli government officials routinely talk
about Palestinians as if they didn’t exist.When they acknowledge their existence, it is usually to justify Israeli
genocide against Palestinians.

Israel
hasn’t just stolen Palestinian land, they now say that Palestinian foods like
falafel and humus are Israeli creations.While on a United Airlines flight, Amer Zahr was reading their magazine
“Hemispheres.”The title of one of the
articles in the magazine was:

“Meet
The Rowdy Revolutionary Chefs Who Are Shaking Up Israeli Cuisine.”

The
article argues that Israel is “a nation of immigrants.”This article misses the point that amongst
the so-called nation of immigrants are Palestinians who can trace their
ancestry to that land for over 12,000 years.The ancestors of these people were the ones who created the so-called “Israeli cuisine.”

We
might also consider that many of the foods people eat in the world today were
developed by Indians in North and South America.I’m talking about corn, potatoes, tomatoes,
peppers, and chocolate.Clearly, there
are many similarities in the way Palestinians and the Indians have been
treated.

Obay
Aboushi is a Palestinian-American who is a member of the New York Jets football
teem. Yahoo Sports published an article
by Adam Walkman who accused Aboushi of “anti-Semitic activism.”The so-called evidence of Aboushi’s so-called
offense was that he attended a family get together at a hotel outside of
Washington DC.

In
the United States, Amer Zahr jokes that Palestinians don’t like to leave their
homes for too long.He says the last
time they did this they lost their homeland.Instead, Zahr’s mother took her children to New York and Washington DC,
where they marched to protest the genocide against Palestinians.

A different perspective

While
I support most of what Zahr says in his book, I look at the ideas he raises
from a different perspective.He argues
that the United States and Israel do not share the same values.This argument is based on Zahr’s point that
the U.S. has a Constitution that claims to represent everyone in this
country.Israel has no such
constitution.

To
counter this argument I will turn to another comedian by the name of Lenny
Bruce.Bruce was arrested several times
and prevented from performing because he was allegedly guilty of obscenity
laws.In other words, he occasionally
used profanity in his comedy.

In
the very First Amendment to the Constitution it says that in this country
people have the right to freedom of speech.If this were a nation of laws, Bruce could have answered all of his
accusers by showing them the First Amendment to the Constitution.However, District Attorney’s as well as
judges violated the Constitution by preventing Bruce from performing because he
allegedly violated their obscenity laws.

Lenny
Bruce responded to this situation with his definition of the word truth.“What is, is.What should be, is
a terrible, terrible lie they told the people a long time ago.”

Do
the governments of the United States and Israel have similar values?This is the record.

The origins of the state of Israel

Before
the first and second world wars Britain was the world’s superpower.However, Britain’s empire was collapsing and
the Brits had huge debts to U.S. bankers.The first and second world wars decided what nation would be the new
superpower.Capitalists from the United
States won that contest.Tens of
millions of people lost their lives as a result of these two wars, but the
capitalists in the United States became, in effect, the royalty of the world.

After
the two world wars, in the year 1948, both Israel and apartheid South Africa
became nations.At that time the United
States had stolen immense areas of land from the Indians and placed them on
reservations.The U.S. also had the Jim
Crow laws that denied Black people citizenship rights in this country.

Both
South Africa and Israel followed the U.S. example.South Africa instituted their apartheid laws
that denied the first inhabitants of that land citizenship rights.The apartheid government also set up
Bantustans that were reserved for Black people.

The
Israeli government also stole the land from its original inhabitants.They set up laws that, in effect,
discriminate against anyone who is not Jewish.They also set up the equivalent of the reservations or Bantustans.In Israel, these reservations were called the
West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Amer
Zahr calls the U.S. government “enablers” of Israel.This is because the government in this
country gives Israel about five billion dollars every year.Why does the government in this country give
so much money to the relatively small nation of Israel?

In
the United States no corporation will make even one dime’s worth of profit
without a continuous flow of oil.Without oil, workers will not be able to travel.Without oil, corporations will not be able to
send their commodities to market.

The
nation of Israel sits in the middle of the region where most of the oil on this
planet is located.While the Israeli
government may have occasional disagreements with Washington, Israel has been
the most dependable of all the U.S. government allies in that region.This is why Washington gives Israel about
five billion dollars every year.

Is Israel a failed state?

Amer
Zahr argues, in effect, that Israel is a failed state.He also clearly has a point when he says that
Israel is not a democracy.However, I
look at these questions from a different point of view.

Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin was a central leader of the Russian Revolution.He was arrested, sent into exile, and then
led the Bolsheviks to take state power.The Bolsheviks promised the people of that part of the world three basic
things.These were: peace, bread, and land.

Unlike
politicians who say one thing, then do something else, Lenin was willing to
risk everything in order to deliver on these promises.The horrors that took place in the Soviet
Union after the death of Lenin came about because of betrayals by the
government headed by Joseph Stalin.

Lenin
wrote two pamphlets that I believe are relevant to this discussion.One is State
and Revolution.There is a basic
fact of life the universities and the media would like to ignore.This is that the most affluent people of the
world never produce the wealth they own.There are two sources to all wealth.These are human labor and the land.

Lenin
argued that the state, as we know it, is a “special repressive force” that was
invented to be used to extract wealth from working people, and transfer that
wealth to a tiny minority.Lenin’s idea
of democracy was a democratic dictatorship of workers and farmers.

This
meant that the new workers government would make the human needs of all their
top priority.Because profits would no
longer be a priority, the new government would use the “special repressive
force” of the state to repress the interests of the former capitalists as well
as their government.

Many
people have difficulty with the idea that the government in this country, that
pretends to represent “democracy,” is in fact a “special repressive
force.”However, the facts speak for
themselves.

Amer
Zahr argues that when Palestinians saw the horrendous bombing of their homeland
this summer, they were enraged but not surprised.They had seen all this before and have come
to expect this kind of horror from the state of Israel.

The
question is: Why would we think that the government of the United States is
different?While the Israeli government
has murdered thousands in their genocidal wars, the U.S. government has
murdered millions in places like, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Before
the Civil War, there was a law in this country called The Fugitive Slave Act.This
law required state governments in the North to apprehend escaped slaves and
return them to bondage.

Today,
most immigrants in this country come from Mexico where they might have had
wages of $2 per day.In the United
States many immigrants have jobs in the food industry, working the fields, or
in food processing plants, or preparing food in restaurants.These are jobs many people in this country
don’t want to do.If all of the 12
million immigrants in this country were deported, the economy would clearly
fall apart.

President
Obama has been deporting immigrants at a rate of close to 1,000 every day.The thousands of people who President Obama deports aren’t returned
to the system of chattel slavery.However, the similarities between Obama’s deportations and the
enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act are striking.

Lenin
also wrote a pamphlet titled, Imperialism
The Highest Stage Of Capitalism.Here
he argued that the ultimate goal of capitalist powers is to dominate the
politics as well as the economies of nations throughout the world.In other words, President Obama shares
responsibility for all the deaths and destruction we saw in the Gaza Strip this
past summer.

So,
the problem with Israel isn’t that it is a failed state.As a nation that is a colonial settler
capitalist state, it can only be a special
force of repression.Clearly, giving
Palestinians the same rights as Palestinians living in the United
States would be a clear advance.However, I would think that the ultimate goal would be to have a government
in that region dedicated to preventing the crimes of the Israeli government
from ever happening again.

The laws of capital and the opportunities for revolution

In
the year 1929 the capitalist economy of the world fell apart.In the year 2008 the most powerful banks in
the world nearly closed their doors.Why
would this happen when there are resources in the world to eliminate poverty?

Capitalism
has certain laws that no one ever votes for.This means that corporations are always obsessed with selling more and
more commodities.At the same time they
are also obsessed with cutting costs.

Sooner
or later there are more commodities on the market than people are
purchasing.This is when recessions and
depressions occur.We might consider
that economic crisis under capitalism is created by overproduction and not
because of shortages.

Politicians
and corporate officers will not be able to prevent the economic collapse that
will happen.In fact, the first
theoreticians of capitalism, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, both understood that
the total collapse of the capitalist system is inevitable.

Understanding
these facts, we can see how workers and farmers will have an opportunity to put
in place a government that places a priority on human needs above profits.These will be the kinds of governments that
will begin the liberation of humanity all over the world.

About Me

I am the author of the novel "Looking Back From 2101." My novel imagines a future world where poverty and discrimination are no longer a part of the human condition. My blog contains articles and poems that I've written over the years. Many of my poems are biographies of historical figures who I have found to be inspiring.